These include a commitment to preventing unnecessary early deaths, a pledge to enhance the quality of life for people with long-term conditions and a drive to ensure that people have a positive experience when using the health service.

If the new standards are achieved, 24,000 early deaths a year could be prevented from cancer and other long-term conditions, Mr Lansley believes.

In addition, fewer people with long-term conditions including asthma and diabetes will be treated in hospitals, he will claim, while patients undergoing routine hip and knee operations will no longer be left in pain or unable to walk.

Access to NHS dentists will also be improved, he will say.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mr Lansley says his tenure as Health Secretary will have been a “failure” if the 60 new “outcome” targets do not improve by the next election. He pledges that the benchmarks will now “define what the NHS is setting out to achieve”.

“We have to clear the decks and be clear this is what we are focusing on,” he says. “People say in three and a half years’ time, in 2015, at the next election, how will we know whether you’ve succeeded or not? The answer is 'have the outcomes improved?’

“It will be my failure if we haven’t improved them and the NHS should feel that it has not succeeded, that is what we are setting out to do.”

Next week, the Government will set out current performance for each of the 60 indicators. It will then set out national targets for improvement “by the time of the next election and beyond”.

Today, data that compares patients’ experiences at individual GPs’ surgeries, and subsequent recovery times, will be published for the first time. Ministers hope that the detailed publication of the information will force up standards – a process that they expect will accelerate as patients choose not be treated at institutions with below-average performance.

The new NHS Commissioning Board and the Care Quality Commission will also intervene directly to address problems that are highlighted by the data.

In today’s interview, Mr Lansley says that the long-running row over NHS reform must end and the health service must concentrate on improving patient care.

“We’ve really got to get into the big picture, which is delivering improvements in the results we achieve for patients right across the board,” he said. “We know that we can do it.”

The benchmarks will be monitored partly through studying clinical data – for example, to ascertain whether mortality rates for cancer, liver and heart disease are improving — and partly through surveying patients to gauge whether they were satisfied by the standard of care they received and the speed of their recovery.

The Health Secretary says: “This is literally saying to patients 'if you were in hospital, if you were being looked after by your general practitioner was the service and experience you had good or not?’ It’s not like some other kinds of medical model where you kind of treat people and they get better. This is different.

“This is really where you begin to kind of focus on the experience of care.”

For the first time, the views of bereaved relations and even children will be surveyed so that the quality of NHS care from early years until death can be assessed.

“We’ll be undertaking a consistent national survey of the bereaved relatives of people who received end of life care,” Mr Lansley said. “Asking them, after a suitable passage of time, what was their loved one’s experience of care and how well were they looked after towards the end of life.”

He added: “[We will] ask children about their experience. So 5 to 16-year-olds would be part of this survey, with their parents, so for the first time we’ll be measuring as part of the outcomes, the children’s experience of their care.”

Mr Lansley says that he is concerned that for many diseases, including cancer, Britain’s survival rates lag behind other countries. He also points to internal audits showing that NHS treatment often does not provide a solution to a problem. For example, he says he received an audit showing that almost half of patients who had a knee replacement did not experience a reduction in pain or an increase in mobility.

There has been growing concern among ministers over the mounting evidence showing poor levels of nursing care within the NHS.

A recent CQC report found that elderly patients in half of NHS hospitals were not being properly cared for because of a lack of “kindness and compassion”.

Mr Lansley has long been critical of the previous government’s system of targets – which guaranteed that patients would be seen and discharged from accident and emergency units within a specified period of time. He said this “produced perverse incentives”.